Suppose Obama manages to get the money and finds some militias in Syria that aren't as radical as ISIS. Okay, suppose they damage the regime and the regime begins to totter. Will these "moderates" win? Or will this just give an opening for ISIS to take over along with more radical (i.e. more fervently Muslim) factions?

Assad's government is more secular and more tolerant of minority religious factions than any other group that might take over in Syria. Overthrow Bashar al-Assad and then the Alawites, Christians, Shiites and other minor factions get shafted. So why support Assad's overthrow? This is crazy.

America's elites do not make a serious case for why the overthrow of Assad

Obama is welcoming in hoards of poor immigrants with poor prospects while he pursues a policy in the Middle East as deluded as that of George W. Bush. Differences between peoples are real and long lasting. When will our foolish elites get that thru the heads?

They can't believe that because it goes against their absolute number one myth: that you can have a functioning society that is not based on any real group identity but on an ad-hoc coming together of people and groups with temporary common interests -- what I call a "fiat" state because of the obvious parallels with paper money and gold.

A society is just a machine for letting people live together, and sometimes the machine gets a life of its own. In the west, the machines themselves have become detached from the peoples and nations that created them, and are now in the hands of internationalist elites whose own self-interest is to keep the old nationalities away from the levers of power, while further eroding the host population's sense of identity by mass immigration. The last thing they want is for the results of their foreign policy to show how bankrupt that model is, and so they will continue to throw resources at holding together the unfixable states in the middle east, lest their own satrapies be the next to explode.